How poorly we honoured our Olympics champions. Money is not the solution

It’s jubilant to see our olympics heroes getting their dues in terms of huge cash and materialistic rewards. After all these years of stringent training, dedication to their respective sports they deserve what they are felicitated with. Any news channels, social media posts or blogposts you turn to are dedicated with the charisma of Olympics heroes. The praises will keep on pouring and it will continue for next few week until a cricket tournament starts somewhere around the calendar. Which is not an issue and it shouldn’t be. Cricketers do have moral backing and support in every form required for athletes. But my concern is about other athletes of other sports. What will happen with them in the future? Will they keep on getting the attention and backing they are getting? or the patriotism towards their sports will raise at the next CWG or Olympics?

Dipa Karmakar glued us to the television set while she was performing. We praised her for her efforts, will keep her trending on social networks by calling her “Desh ki beti”, Running “beti bachao beti khelao” on networks to honour P.V Sindhu and Sakshi Malik for their medals. But yes, all for a limited period of time.

Then comes the phase of glam, authorities, state governments, movie stars flowering our champions with millions to billions of rupees and gifts. This phase is liked by all, the players, the countrymen and the authorities but none of us care to think “Only if these kind of money was invested on players 2-3 years back rather than giving away as prize, we could have scratched those bronze and silver into golds”. I may be sounding like a maverick, these players deserve these gifts but isn’t it too late? Just imagine, how fruitful this scenario could have been if these heavy cash would have been spent prior to the games.

We are tubelight We understand things when it’s already too late. From lacking facilities for practice to the lacking facilities at the game resulting in being booed around the globe. Then we realise, we did something wrong. We should somehow cover this mess up. How can we do this to ensure we remain in good health and send the globe a message that we care? The answer to every such question is ‘money”. We could have opened more academies with better facilities with the name of our champions but we rather went on by paying them. We still could have or can correct our mistakes by providing better facilities to the players and supporting them rather than praising the winners forever and trolling olympics medalists on twitter for losing.

What will make a neophyte wrestler fallen on the ground stand again? What will I do if I keep on falling like this or to know that there are people to support him and teach him how not to fall again?

Imagine, what will make P.V Sindhu feel good? 3 crore rupee and a car or 1 crore rupee with an academy named “Sindhu Badminton Academy” for an eternity.